I know from speaking with sales reps and VP’s of Sales across the country that following someone else’s blueprint for success can be a dangerous time-waster. Sales formulas, processes, and strategies can seem like the flavor of the season.

Changing things up and moving on when something doesn’t work makes sense. But chasing your tail in circles with information is a real career killer.

One day it’s all about the Challenger Sales Model and next year it’s MEDDIC. Eat, sleep, breath the MEDDIC checklist. Until of course, we need more answers and then Scientific Selling comes along.

Adapting to a Tight Talent Market

As of December 2018, 129.14 million people in the US are employed on a full-time basis.

Now let’s look at unemployment. During the Great Recession, unemployment peaked in 2010 to 14.83 Million. Unemployment incrementally dropped over the next few years, and in 2016 fell to 7.75M, and 2017 dropped to 6.98 million.

The current US population in 2017 was 325.7 million and today sits at 328,254,391 million according to The US and World Population Clock provided by the United States Census Bureau.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, (BLS) calculates the Civilian Labor Force at 49% of the US population, or 164M people. This gives us a 4.25% unemployment rate for the civilian workforce.

We can also calculate that 78% of the eligible civilian workforce is working on a full-time basis. The rest are working on a part-time basis or are unemployed.

Every top salesperson will eventually quit. What’s even more painful is the best leave when they are on top, so if you’re not careful, you may not even see it coming. As the job market tightens, sales professionals have more and more lucrative and exciting job opportunities vying for their attention.

I was on the phone with one of my candidates yesterday. A true talent with an amazing track record of sales success hunting and winning new business. Probably not another person like him in the entire region --he is that good.

Today’s employees have one thing on their mind: flexibility. With traffic increasing, work hours rising, and vacation day usage decreasing, the one thing employees seek is flexibility. Two out of three candidates today don’t think they must be sitting at their desk to be productive and do their job according to ManpowerGroup Solutions’ Global Candidate Preference Survey

In good economies and bad, finding top talent is difficult. Think it's any easier for Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Google? Sure, they have distinct competitive advantages, but it still takes teams of recruiters interviewing around the clock to recruit and hire staff even for well branded growing organizations.

Measuring recruitment success in the sales department has never been more important. In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, every sales hire counts. Time-to-fill, the all-time most important recruitment metric, has been replaced with an overarching obsession for “quality of hire.” Yet one deeply entrenched problem remains inherent in this metric. Unlike measuring time-to-fill, which is a fairly straight forward calculation, untethering quality of hire from other variables is virtually impossible. You don’ have a shot at making this measurement meaningful for your sales hires. It’s too intertwined and dependent upon other pre-hire variables.

Is Building a Winning Sales Team as Simple as Following a Proven Recipe?

If I want to bake a chocolate cake, I’ll pull out a recipe book. Then I’ll follow the directions and in about an hour and a half or so I’ll have a cake. If you just follow a recipe, you’ll get predictable results. Right?

Except every time I try to bake a chocolate cake, it never comes out quite the same. Sometimes they’re good , sometimes they’re burnt, other times they just taste like a cardboard sponge. (Not sure I’ve ever eaten a cardboard sponge, but you get the point.)

Banging your head against the wall trying to recruit for your sales team?

Are you recruiting top software sales talent and running into roadblocks? You’re not alone. The sales function appears to be an easy role to recruit for on the outset. Yet recruiting sales talent is one of the more difficult and time-consuming recruitment jobs around.

Are You Still Trying to Recruit and Hire the "Perfect Salesperson"?

Hiring can bring out your worst fears. Especially if you’re a new manager or just starting with a new organization. When your first goal is to immediately staff up—your reputation hangs in the balance. Everyone’s watching...quietly rooting for your success or failure.